Scott's father was a linen
draper. Not much else is known about her life before the publication of
The Female Advocate, dedicated to her friend
Mary Steele, in 1774. Scott credits
John Duncombe's
The Feminead (1754), a poem in praise of the accomplishments of women writers, as the inspiration for her own poem. The poem consists of 522 lines of rhyming couplets; it supplements Duncombe's, and discusses more contemporary writers. Among the poets referred to are
Lucy Aikin,
Anna Laetitia Barbauld,
Mary Chudleigh,
Sarah Fielding,
Anne Killigrew,
Catharine Macaulay,
Catherine Parr,
Helen Maria Williams, and
Phillis Wheatley. Men are also praised: Duncombe; Rev.
Thomas Seward, author of
The Female Right to Literature, in a Letter to a Young Lady from Florence (1766); William Steele, for his support of his daughter's writing; and
Richard Pulteney (1730–1801), a friend and physician who encouraged Scott. She began a correspondence with
Anna Seward, whose father she had praised in
The Female Advocate, and Seward's published letters are the source of much that is known of Scott's life. consequently, when her husband, who had formerly convinced her to convert to Unitarianism, embraced Quakerism, she underwent considerable strain. Scott gave birth to a daughter in 1789 and a son in 1791 (her son,
John Edward Taylor, went on to found the
Manchester Guardian). She died late in her third pregnancy, in 1793, at the age of forty-one. == Works ==